Secretary of State Ken Bennett said Tuesday he wants to
avoid a repeat of this year’s long wait for all of Arizona’s ballots to
be counted.

At a news conference, Bennett said a large part of the solution lies
in speeding up the process of tallying ballots cast by early voters,
many of whom dropped off ballots at polling places or wound up casting
provisional ballots because they were on precincts’ early voter lists.

That contributed to counties, Maricopa in particular, having more
than 600,000 ballots to count after election day. Bennett said the count
was on track to be completed Tuesday afternoon.

“If a significant chunk of those half a million early ballots that
were dropped off or voted at the polls could have been processed at the
polls, then we’d have had 70,000 or 80,000 ballots to count over the
next few days,” Bennett said. “We’d have been done in a week.”

Two of Arizona’s congressional races
remained undecided as the count dragged on. Democratic state lawmaker
Kyrsten Sinema declared victory in the 9th Congressional District six
days after the election, while U.S. Rep. Ron Barber, D-Tucson, emerged
as the winner in the 2nd Congressional District nearly two weeks after
election day.

While Bennett said the main goal of counting ballots must be accuracy
and inclusion, he added that timeliness is important as well.

“If the close race in Arizona this year had been the presidential
race, and the Electoral College was tied 265 to 265 and the whole
country and world were waiting for Arizona’s 11 electoral votes,”
Bennett said, “what do you think the scrutiny would be?”

Bennett said he plans to meet with county officials from all across the state to brainstorm ideas for improving the process.

Bennett said improvements could include adding county-wide voting
centers that would be able to process early ballots faster than the
current system of putting them in boxes to be delivered to a central
counting location.

“If that signature could be checked at the voting center right then,
then that ballot could go right into the machine that day and be part of
the results that are released at 8 o’clock that night,” Bennett said.

Voting centers are already used in Yuma and Yavapai counties.

The 30 centers in Yavapai County, which replaced precinct voting this
year, have been an overwhelming success, according to County Recorder
Leslie Hoffman.

“We’ve had not one provisional ballot from someone voting in the
wrong place,” she said. “There’s no wrong place to vote anymore in this
county. You can vote anywhere.”

Bennett said it would be up to each county to decide on a mix of precinct polling places and voting centers.

Randall Holmes, a voting rights activist and member of the board of
the Arizona Advocacy Network, said he was unconvinced that voting
centers would be an ideal solution. He used the example of a last-minute
voter rushing to a polling place to illustrate his point.

“The chances are they’re going to find their local polling place
easier than they’re going to find some voting center that’s 10 miles
away in rush-hour traffic,” Holmes said.

Bennett also clarified remarks he made over the weekend, when The
Associated Press reported that he wanted to overhaul Arizona’s voting
system.

“The system is not necessarily broken just because we want to make it
better,” he said. “This concept of overhauling is not a scrapping and
throwing everything out and starting from scratch.”

Also Tuesday, House Minority Leader Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix,
announced plans to introduce legislation calling for a bipartisan
committee to study ways to reform Arizona elections based on problems
reported this year and in previous years.

In a news release, Campbell cited what he called “an unprecedented
number of provisional ballots and reported statewide irregularities” in
this year’s election.

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Secretary of State Ken Bennett addresses a news conference Tuesday at which he said he is looking for ways to count early ballots faster in Arizona.

The late count

Early Ballots: Dropped off at polling places on election day. Some ballots turned in prior to election day.

Regular Provisional Ballots: Cast by voters whose names didn’t show
up on precinct rosters or who they were marked as casting an early
ballot.

Conditional Provisional Ballots: Cast by those who don’t have the
correct identification at the polls. Those voters had until end of the
day Wednesday, Nov. 14, to get to their county’s elections office and
show the necessary ID.

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